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Carmack sorry about performance of Rage on PC

Rage was a mess when it came out on PC in late 2011, and while patches improved the game, it still was frustrating to play. Id Software's John Carmack apologized to QuakeCon attendees on how "badly we handled the game in the PC space."

Rage was a mess when it came out on PC in late 2011, and while patches improved the game, it was still frustrating to play. id Software's John Carmack apologized to QuakeCon attendees on how "badly we handled the game in the PC space."

As part of his keynote, Carmack said that he was happy with Rage's gameplay, but that the company could have taken more time on things like the checkpoint save system and the weak ending. But he said it was "inexcusable" to release the game on PC when half the users could not play the game because of driver issues. "There's just no way to argue our way out of it."

He said that PC is far better as a platform when it is working right, but PC instability is always an issue when compared to consoles because of driver issues. "It was optimistic naivete. We tried to get the drivers to work the way they were supposed to, but we weren't smart about the fact that most people wouldn't have these drivers if everything had gone right."

He promised the company would do better going forward, even saying there was talk of making a Rage 2 to fix all the issues and do it right, but because of the company's limited resources, it was decided that all the efforts would focus on Doom 4.

John Keefer

Contributing Editor

John Keefer is a curmudgeon that has been in journalism for 35 years, the last 16 in the video games industry. He loves real-time strategy games and prefers old-school Total Annihilation to StarCraft. He also loves isometric RPGs, and has been addicted to World of Warcraft for more than 10 years. He sucks at shooters and multiplayer and is purely a PC guy. And being a former member of Shack, he also likes Chatty. Go figure.